Ariana looked up, her gaze focused on me. I had to fight to keep my eyes on hers because her pupils and irises had vanished, and her eyes swallowed the light.

“I liked Peter,” she said, and my heart started beating again. If she was tracking that well, we might be okay. “Samuel asked him to help us with my fear of werewolves. Peter was … kind.”

She wasn’t all back—the smell of magic wasn’t fading, and her voice sounded wrong. And her eyes were really freaky.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I kept talking. “Adam and the pack, all the pack except Ben, are being held by a group of human radicals—some of whom appeared military trained. They’re trying to blackmail Adam into killing Senator Campbell of Minnesota. They’re still claiming government ties, but they are lying.”

“Republican,” supplied Gabriel, trying not to stare at Ariana’s eyes and mostly failing. It was a good thing for him that the fae don’t see it as an act of aggression the way the wolves do. A lot of the fae liked being stared at. When she met his gaze, he gamely kept talking. “Campbell is anti-fae, anti-werewolf, and—oddly for a Republican—anti-gun. Good speaker and a likely presidential candidate in the next election.”

“Gabriel’s taking a class in current events,” Jesse told me. She looked away from Ariana and took a step closer to me. She didn’t see the fae start forward as if to pounce, then catch herself—but Gabriel and I did. Gabriel moved a half step sideways so that he was between Ariana and Jesse.

Oblivious to her near death, Jesse asked, “Who are they? The National Rifle Association?”

“No clue,” I told her. “The NRA …” I gave her a weary smile. “It seems like a lot of trouble for them to go to since there are plenty of other anti-gun senators, and none of them have made much headway against private gun ownership since the assassination attempt on President Reagan before you were born.”

“Then who?”

“If Campbell died and was killed by a werewolf, it would destroy the détente between those who want to kill the wolves and those who want to see them as good people with a terrible disease,” Gabriel said. “After the fae killed that senator’s son who got away with murder, the only reason everyone isn’t running around killing anyone who is other is because the fae have withdrawn and haven’t done anything to hurt anyone else. Public opinion—after the first few days of panic—is behind them, even if the government is throwing fits. Freeing a serial killer because he killed only fae and werewolves wasn’t justice. That the guilty man had money and political ties just made the fae’s cause more righteous.”